Wednesday, November 4, 2009

My phone battery now maintains a charge for interesting usage for about five minutes. "Interesting usage" is defined to be any use other than standby mode. So, in other words, calls, texting, internet browsing, Sudoku, MP3 playing, and other uses all collapse with a beep and a shutdown after a few minutes.

I could buy a new battery for about $40. This is likely the most economical solution, short term. However, a secondary issue is that the phone's features have some limitations that make it much less useful to me than I thought when I purchased it in early 2008. Also, there seem to be some software defects that cause the phone to reboot intermittently when I use certain features.

I've been a Sprint customer for my cell service for a long time. They irritate me some, but when I talk to customers of other carriers, I find that customer service highlights are rare. Some of my friends swear by their service with their respective carriers, but other friends have had abominable experiences with the same carriers, so it seems to be a wash. So, absent a compelling reason to change carriers, I'll just stay where I am. This eliminates the iPhone until they decouple with AT&T.

I could go backwards a bit and get a less feature-rich phone, but I find that I do use quite a few of the phone's features naturally, without inventing reasons to use them, so I'd like to retain those features in a new device.

I'm leaning toward one of the Sprint Android phones. Plus, I could possibly use the Android development kit to make my own apps. Except that I'm pretty lazy with respect to that sort of thing.